Month: April 2017

  • When You Don’t Want to be Friendly and Open and Curious

    When You Don’t Want to be Friendly and Open and Curious

    That’s okay. It’s normal. Go ahead and hermit.

     

    I stare resolutely out the window of my Uber at the windy Cape Town day, quite determined to see that any attempts at conversation die a quick death.

    As our fellow hostel guest in Matosinhos (northern Portugal), a kind man from Tokyo determined to talk about marijuana at length, engages my friend in discussion about alternative cures for cancer, I stare resolutely at my book, quite determined to leave the onus of politeness on her.

    A talkative-looking chap sits down next to me at a cafe. I pretend not to speak English, or Portuguese, or French, or Spanish…I stare resolutely at my coffee cup, quite, determined to be Russian for the next hour or so.

    Surprised?

    I write so much about openness in travel, without giving any stage time to its inevitable counterpart: closedness.

    I think I’ve touched on this before, but never really delved into it: No one can be “on” all the time.

    For permanent vagabonds, this can be a slow realization. After all, aren’t curiosity, openness, and willingness to engage the key ingredients to meaningful travel experiences? Sure, but then, so is balance.

    I love my alone time. Fiercely. I am probably less social, less inclined to long chats, and less of a people person than you are (and I don’t know who is reading this).

    I write often about kindness, talking to strangers, being open to the world—and rarely about selfishness, ignoring talkative strangers, and withdrawing from the world.

    But balance, right?

    Lest you mistakenly conclude after reading my blogs that one must always be friendly, happy, and socially-inclined in order to travel, let me assure you: I’m not.

    After all, how else would I get so many articles written?

    Someone once told me that I like the idea of people more than I actually like people, and he was probably right. Humans are so fascinating! Culture, language, food, stories—I love it, and I want to soak it all in…50-90% of the time. The other 10-50%, I really cherish my own company (another key ingredient for solo travel), and I don’t want to share it.

    Balance.

    For those naturally inclined to solitude, there’s a spider-web-fine line—at which you may choose to stare resolutely while seeking to avoid conversation—between comfortable, uncompromising introspection, and exhausting, unrelenting openness. And if you can dangle from that line by your toes, in an incredible feat of mental acrobatics, you just might find the recipe for richly balanced, joyful adventure.

    Maybe your travel soup will have some of the same ingredients as mine:

    > Ample time to read, write, yoga, and think
    > Bizarre and fascinating interactions with strangers
    > Learning experiences of all variety
    > Wordless (heart-centered) communication with people and spaces
    > Silence in abundance
    > Dancing and other movement in abundance
    > Kindness
    > Selfishness
    > Outward-focused curiosity
    > Introspective curiosity
    > Creative exploration
    > Physical adventure

    So happy travels, and happy soup-making—I hope you’ll find just the right balance.

    Please share your favorite ingredients if I’ve forgotten any!

     

    Photo Credit: Zen Monkey Photography

  • The Rough and Wrinkled Side of Adventure

    The Rough and Wrinkled Side of Adventure

    Sunday, 23 April. Porto, Portugal.

    Welcome to the world of unplanned adventure.

    It’s messy. It’s unphotogenic. It’s wild-ish.

    It’s kind-hearted French tourists warning you that you’re being followed (you know already) and offering to accompany you wherever you need to go (you’re touched).

    It’s hastily scribbled hitchhiking signs, crumpled and smoothed out again. It’s sloppy smiley faces in the O’s of Oporto. It’s red eyes after too much dancing in other people’s clouds of smoke, and not enough sleep. It’s aching feet and dirty jeans.

    It’s strange people chasing after you in the street to tell you they like your hat.

    It is so far from glamorous that any Instagram post on the matter seems discordant.

    It’s empty coffee cups and chipped tiles, half-formed impressions flitting in and out of your mind. It’s improvised, individual, and in flux, but not quite indescribable. It’s sauerkraut and beets for dinner, because the Russian supermarket is the only one open on Sunday evening.

    It is chaotic. It is alive. It is enlivening.

    Welcome to the world of rough, messy, unplanned and unplannable adventure.

    It’s not just on the other side of the world (though it’s here, too). It’s in your backyard—as long as there’s dirt. It’s in your dreams—as long as there are dragons. It’s in every crumpled page, wild dance, and imperfect human encounter that appears in the archives of your life.

    And isn’t it beautiful?

  • Some Things I Like (About Travel)

    Some Things I Like (About Travel)

     

    Lisbon, Portugal. Saturday afternoon, somewhere far from the city center.

    I like this cafe, edged in fading sunlight, that flanks a nondescript park.

    I like sitting by myself and soaking in unknown smells that will soon be memories.

    I like following conversation like it’s music, unaware of any meaning beyond what I can discern from the melody.

    I like sitting on the metro and not understanding a word anyone says.

    I like struggling to understand basic signage.

    I like not being sure whether the sign on the door says “push” or “pull.”

    I like ordering from a menu at random.

    I like not being sure which way to look before crossing the street…and then checking both ways twice, just to be safe.

    I like when buildings surprise me by speaking, and streets by staying silent.

    I like uneven cobblestones, and I like parts of cities no one tells you to go to because they are boring.

    I like when a bus ride is an adventure; a walk around the block a quest.

    I like feeling out of place.

    I like blending in and feeling like I’ve gotten away with something.

    I like when it’s not too easy.

    I like when nothing can be taken for granted.

    Most of all, I like getting lost in the unfamiliar, which renders humility not a choice, but an inevitable outcome.

    It is good to be back here.

  • The Strangeness

    The Strangeness

     

    “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

    Sorry, Robert Stevenson, on two counts. First, I still haven’t actually read any of your books, but I swear they’re on my list. Second, I’m going to have to disagree with you on that lovely and popular quote of yours.

    Because I’m starting to think that there are only foreign lands. That nothing is, after all, familiar or domestic. That when we spend a portion of time “abroad,” away from what was once home or something like it, we realize that “home” is just as strange, just as illogical, just as arbitrary as all the rest.

    ***

    The sun is out in uncharacteristic force, and as I walk down the street in Chelsea, London, it reflects back at me with a grin off a row of tall, identical apartment buildings.

    The walls are spotlessly white. The streets are free of garbage. The public transit runs seamlessly.

    I have just arrived this morning from Cape Town, South Africa. And as I am coming to expect when I jump continents, I’m slightly bewildered by everything… The old lady in a mauve pantsuit and Ugg boots pushing her walker with one hand and holding her mauve hat with the other. The young men wearing shorts and T-shirts (whereas I have just pulled my down coat out of storage). The utter politeness of traffic on Kings Road.

    Politics and economics, on the other hand, run parallel. Xenophobia and poor economic choices rule the day, here as much as elsewhere.

    I digress. It is the strangeness that lingers with me today, and which I would attempt to describe. The slight eeriness of one of the places I consider a home base. A flutter in my stomach as I amble along the too-neat lanes and study the too-same rows of pretty buildings.

    London.

    London, where I stay for free. London, where I have friends, a climbing gym membership, and a regular cafe, supermarket, and aerial dance studio.

    London, where I don’t need a map.

    London, where I keep coming back, although I can never quite decide if I even like the place.

    As I do in Cape Town, I have a community here. And so I return again and again, such that it has become familiar, evan banal, to visit.

    Except, not this time. This time, it is the sense of strangeness, not of homecoming, that strikes me first. The roads too straight, the people too well dressed, the pavement too clean, the attitude of the entire city just a bit too…deferential.

    As spring unfurls in the flowering magnolia trees and the underdressed pedestrians, London opens her arms to me, and I hardly recognize her.

    This, too, is a foreign land.

    And if this is foreign, then nowhere—nowhere is anything but.

    Why talk about this strangeness? This foreignness of the formerly familiar?

    “This is our tragedy….our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.” ― Salman Rushdie

    It’s critical to acknowledge the inescapable quality of strangeness in a world brimming with fearful people seeking security in the familiar. People who genuinely believe there is a “right” way to build a city, be in a city, be a city.

    There is no right way.

    There is no “standard” from which all other lands digress in various degrees of foreignness. Such a standard is fiction, and it divides us.

    Perhaps the truer statement is this:

    All lands are foreign, and it is us, only us, who are the same—everywhere.